


trina darling

by cosmickirk



Category: Falsettos - Lapine/Finn
Genre: Gen, character study? i guess, rating for mild swearing + vague descriptions of sex, trina is a little sad but making it work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-09 00:04:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11657460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmickirk/pseuds/cosmickirk
Summary: "He pauses, as if wondering what kind of girl waits until her clothes are shucked to introduce herself."Trina through the years.





	trina darling

 

Trina has always, from her earliest, most innocent years, valued upkeep. The unruffled archness of her mother was a thing to covet, and one day, with enough mousse and moisturizer, a thing to inherit. The careful trimmings of a woman acutely aware of being observed. In the abstract, political sense, of course, because on a moment-to-moment basis Trina manages to go comfortably unnoticed. Though that's not to say unloved, and she thinks of her second-place finish in the race for homecoming queen.

 

With the advent of exotic beauties, however, the sweetly pretty have lost their luster. So she remains unnoticed with her flat-ish chestnut hair and soft unwinding body. Unnoticed by those dark-eyed boys in her philosophy classes, the ones that rest their chins thoughtfully on long, tapered fingers.

 

Still, she is obstinate in applying her rosehip eyecream (a three-dollar, drug store salvation) nightly. Kneading her knuckles into the dark circles she is too young to have.

 

She lets her forehead crease and skin collect sweat only when she paints. Overalls loose around her thighs, spotted with yellow acrylic, red oil, lilac pastel. She bites her lip and coils her face disapprovingly. Let the wrinkles come; her mind is elsewhere. She closes one eye, than the other, deciding if the composition of her painting adds meaning to the piece or if she had defaulted to what was easiest. A sigh. She's overthinking it, and leaves the painting half-finished.

 

One day, she draws herself. In charcoal, a medium she's not so used to. She stands naked in front of the mirror, surprised by her own frankness. She turns in slow circles, passes a hand down her thighs and around her breasts, mapping the body that until now she has known only in broad strokes. The contrast between her dark hair and her pale, poreless skin she finds compelling, so she props a sketchpad on her knee and gets to work. Despite her clumsiness with charcoal, it's the first piece in months that gives her nothing to complain about.

 

She is something of a night owl in those years, untethered and buoyant once the city starts to sleep. Her curtains flutter ghostlike in the breeze and it really should be eerie, but Trina has decided to be a modern woman. One who listens to experimental records and votes Democrat and reasons her way out of juvenile fears.

 

The apartment creaks as she tiptoes along its narrow hall, feeling light in her isolation. She will rest at three or four a.m, and in the morning rejuvenate herself with a strong coffee before class. For now, she turns blue, watching the ambient glow of the city filter through the living-room window and scatter across her skin.

 

Much later, a boy will trace his calloused fingers along this same skin and marvel at its softness, it's rosehip fragrance, will tell her she is as perfect as porcelain

 

And she, in turn, will take him into her bed, because he has the unassuming handsomeness that she conflates with tenderness, and his almost-mean banter surprises her at each turn. She will clutch him to her naked chest and curl her fingers into his hair, will tell him that he's pink as a cherub. His eyes aren't the dark brown she covets but his wide lips split in smile and she feels something like home in the line of his body.

 

 

 

"I'm Trina," she says on their first night together, between tight, gasping breaths.  _And I've never done this._

He lifts his head from where it explores her thigh, and Trina fancies she can see through his not-dark eyes to the back of his skull and into outer space. He pauses, observing her curiously, as if wondering what kind of girl waits until her clothes are shucked to introduce herself.

Chuckling at the earnestness colouring Trina's heart-shaped face, the boy holds out a hand. "I'm Marvin." 

There is another boy before this, a loud, brash, stick of a thing who calls her mean names by way of affection (a lifelong pattern, she later admits, and smiles around the rim of a wine glass, wondering when she stopped seeing the signs). They bump teeth outside the movie theatre, right there in the street. She feels scandalous, and her skin tingles with the novelty of doing something she shouldn't. His name is Dimitri and she's sure they'll get married.

 

The new boy may call her porcelain, but does not treat her as such. He's too excitable, and Trina has to remind him to kiss her between thrusts. She lets him into her apartment again and again because he is just unavailable enough to make her work for his attention and she values upkeep, especially that of smart-aleck boys who turn her inside out against their couches.

 

 

 

Together, they scope out the town's more lenient bouncers, and manage to weasel their way, uncarded, into a few select shitholes, aided by Trina's petite figure and suggestive smiles. She gets too drunk, which leads to the magic of her roving hands. Marvin always stiffens when she gets handsy, but he doesn't stop her, so she allows her lips to glide along his neck, feeling very much like a modern woman indeed

 

Back at Trina's apartment, where he spends more and more nights, he stops her eager fingers from undoing his trousers or lifting his shirt. She giggles, but there's a edge of frustration to her manner as she tugs at his belt buckle. Marvin bats her hands away.

"C'mon, Trina." She is drunk, but not far-gone enough to mistake the scorn in his voice for flirtation. "You know I hate it when you're like this." 

She does, intimately, so they fall asleep without speaking or touching, Ibuprofen capsules and water waiting on the nightstand as Trina wonders idly if she should start painting again, and buy more records, instead of screwing boys she is only three-quarters sure about.

But, sometimes, when Marvin's feeling happy, or drunk, he peppers kisses along the pouch of her stomach, and she's sure they'll get married.

 

This time, her intuition is right.

 

The day she becomes Trina Cohen it pours. A proper, Brontë-esque storm, and in retrospect there were so many signs.

 

( _So many fucking signs_. The bottle is empty, and so is she, and Trina feels magnificently, tragically dumb).

 

The synagogue is cold. She asks what can be done about the draft but Marvin interrupts and assures the caretakers that they're perfectly comfortable.

 

It's all just as she had imagined. A pure, white dress with lace sleeves and a high, tasteful neck. Two-hundred adoring guests. A handsome, Jewish husband, crushing the bottle under his heel to a raucous chorus of  _mazel tov!_  and sweeping his bride into a kiss that wants for nothing. 

 

At the reception, Trina's uncles plant heavy kisses of congratulations on her new husband's cheeks, as he cuts her a look of unfiltered panic. Marvin's family is small and severe, almost Protestant in their repression, while Trina's is half-Italian (on her mother's side), half Polish (on her father's), and entirely exuberant. It'll be an adjustment, to be sure.

 

Trina's thoughts are, for much of the day, mathematical. Standing sidelong she calculates anxiously: if her last period came seven weeks ago and it's November now and she's due in June, what are the chances of her Aunt Marie putting two and two together and spilling it all?

 

She sees her Aunt Donna pinch Marvin's cheek, drag him reluctantly to the dance floor. He meets Trina's eyes across the banquet hall, shrugging helplessly but obliging the old lady in a sloppy imitation of a waltz.

 

On the outskirts of the dancefloor Trina smiles, because she knows she's being scrutinized, and runs a hand along her belly, as if to flatten it.

 

\+ + +

 

Her paintings devolve into hidden artifacts. The rounder she gets, the more she paints, but the less she wants to be seen. She doesn't know if it's an aversion to critique or an aversion to Marvin that compels her to shunt the paintings into the attic, but either way the idea of him finding them, of pursing his lips and appraising them with his big, cold eyes, makes her shudder.

 

The day he inevitably _does_ find them, he is looking for his tool box. He stumbles across a canvas of a pretty oil meadow, a rolled-up watercolour smudging itself, and then finally a whole portfolio of sketches and musings, some half-baked but others impressively intricate. He laughs, delighted that his wife has finally found a way to surprise him.

 

Delighted also at the embarrased flush of her cheeks. Trina, for her part, is furious as he brandishes her nude sketches and teases her for being a creep, scatters her self-portraits and landscapes and even a picture of himself on their bed, laughing as she scrambles to gather and order them all. Trina is about to knock him over in her rage when he pulls her into a kiss, the tender one she has always expected from him, and she melts into his arms without a fight. 

 

She stops painting the very next day. 

 

\+ + +

 

The beginning of the end is quiet, something Trina pulls within herself and learns to label _alright_. 

 

It's alright that Marvin doesn't touch her unless she begs. It's alright that he's only interested in his son half the time and comes home from work later and later, and for stranger and less plausible reasons.

 

It's perfectly alright, until one day, it isn't.

 

"You're crazy," he dismisses her suspicions, not for the first time, pushing past her and lumbering into the kitchen.

 

" _I'm_ crazy?" 

 

She's been drinking, and he's been drinking, and the Earth seems tilted off its axis. She's too drunk to pretend she doesn't see through his bullshit, and he's too drunk to hide the smell of sex that radiates off him in heavy, shameless waves. Neither of them think of Jason, sleeping upstairs, and she jabs at him with an accusing finger.

 

"I'm not the one abandoning her son for some -  _some_ -" she has no words, no experience, no frame of reference for this. She's red in the face and hears her mother warning of wrinkles as she follows her husband to the kitchen. Upkeep. Upkeep of the self. The marriage. The  _home._ Finally, the words reach her: "For some  _queers!"_ she spits them and hopes they latch on somewhere painful, will wait until morning to let the compassion back in. Her voice is low now, and trembling, as she tightens her robe around her. "I'm not the one abandoning  _us --_ " her voice gives out. Is there an  _us_ to speak of, anymore? "-- to get sucked off in a fucking bathroom stall." The words would be crueler if they weren't masking tears.

_"Marvin,"_ she pleads, when he doesn't reply. "Look at me _."_

As he turns, Trina watches her husband's features set themselves coolly in stone. He lifts a corner of his mouth in a cruel mockery of a doting smile, and the worst part is that this is Marvin really trying. She wants to scream but he is done for the night, and each conversation begins and ends at Marvin's will.  

 

He kisses her on the cheek, politely, and they don't talk about it again until the next time, which involves a bottle of wine shattering against the wall and Marvin finally showing some fucking emotion besides exhaustion and condescension. She is glad, glad to be  _seen._

 

The day she finally says  _I can't do this,_ Marvin laughs. Though it's more of a bark, a curt denial, his unassuming handsomeness having receded into a darkened mask. He's a strange, smudged outline to her now, a half-finished painting that has long since ceased to be familiar. She slips off her wedding band. He tells her not to be dramatic as she folds it into his hand and climbs the stairs to take a shower.

 

She curls like a seashell in the tub, stock-still for what feels like hours. She knows hot water creates wrinkles but she needs the feeling of it pelting the unwanted out of her. In this rare moment of alone time she observes her skin. Rosehip skin. Porcelain skin. She smiles sadly. There's cellulite on her thighs, now, and a certain looseness, from pregnancy and inertia. She's still too young for veins, but old enough to fear them.

 

Trina showers until she feels new.

 

\+ + + 

 

 

The night Judas comes to dinner, Trina makes sure to arrange her hair. She doesn't know quite who she's performing for; two queers who wouldn't spare her a second glance? Her ten-year-old son? And the artifice of her life rips open so violently that she doubles over against her vanity. Upkeep. That's what this is all for. She applies her creams, her perfume, lays a pretty pearl necklace around her neck and tries on her best-fitting smile. 

 

Her first thought when he enters her home is that he seems too familiar with its layout.

 

The second is that his legs are, by any measure, preposterously long.

 

She cries at the table only once, which she claims as an emphatic win. It happens when Whizzer takes his first bite of food, because oh  _god,_ why did she spend so much time cooking for him? Why couldn't he have been less pretty? She imagines his doubtless perfect body splayed on her couch, across her marble counter, writhing shamelessly in her own  _bed,_ and a wave of nausea threatens to knock her over.

 

Jason puts a hand on her elbow and she is brought down to Earth, but the dinner table has been submerged in silence and won't resurface for the rest of the night.

 

 

"I'm so sorry, Trina," Whizzer says, later, as she washes the dishes and he leans against the counter. "For how this all turned out."

 

Trina arches a delicate brow. _Turned out._ As if fate had contrived to make Marvin a cheating bastard, and Whizzer a willing whore. As if they were all equally to blame.

 

"Is that so?"

 

Whizzer doesn't understand the question, but nods.

 

"I feel terrible about it," he says, though again his words fall on deaf ears. Trina may have been naïve in the past, and more than a little hopeful, but she has never been stupid, and sees Whizzer's apology for what it is: an attempt to clear his conscience, to get her blessing and fuck her husband without guilt.

 

She wants her laugh to be flippant, but it comes out strained and sad. "I should kill you," she says quietly, forthright for once in her life.

 

"You should," Whizzer admits, shrugging, and Trina is impressed by his matter-of-factness. She realizes bitterly that this man is more of a modern woman than she is. "I would, if the roles were reversed."

 

Trina thinks she will cry again if she looks at him, so she scrubs a plate in overly-tight circles, letting the silence stretch wide between them.

 

Whizzer nods as if he expected nothing more, takes his coat from the hook, and sees himself out. 

  

Over the next few weeks it becomes clear that she doesn't hate Whizzer the way she should. She resents him, sure, resents his charm, his youthful allure and taut skin. The fact that she can't even fault Marvin for loving him. (Well, is it quite loving? And she thinks of the dark marks all along Whizzer's neck, the infidelity he can't or won't give up). 

 

But she doesn't hate him. Comfortably into her thirties, she has no energy for hate. And anyways she's told that hating is a poison that works only against one's self. She's told many things, by a reliable and charming source that she finds herself drawn to more and more.

 

When upkeep fails, Trina smiles. She smiles and she smiles until one day it hurts, and she is slicing cucumber for a salad nobody will like and her knuckles are turning white around the ceramic handle of a knife. When it hurts, she seeps into the cracks of the tiled floor, feeling more at home there than anywhere else.

 

\+ + + 

 

When Marvin moves out, a lightness takes his place. A freshness. A spring in Trina's step that she previously only felt between the hours of one and five a.m, creeping along the hall of her old, blue apartment. It's slow, but Trina finds herself sleeping better at night, wearing her hair loose, unstyled.

 

Months down the line, things start to feel almost normal, if a little subdued. Old routines pick up, demanding time and attention. Dinner becomes an event for two, though soon again three, and the psychiatrist's presence is oddly grounding.

 

She finds herself alone on a warm spring day. It's only two in the afternoon, and Jason won't need to be picked up until three-thirty. Mendel will stumble in two hours later, fatigued but pleased to see her, tender with his arms entwined around her waist. He will wash the dishes, requiring no upkeep, and Trina will feel buoyant again, though not, this time, surviving the night.

 

She stands in a square of sunlight and considers her free time, mouth curled pensively.

 

Finally, piling her hair into a careless knot, Trina decides to do something she hasn't done in years:

 

She puts on a record, and she paints.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> more love for trina please and thank you 
> 
> thank you all for reading!!


End file.
